Sunday and the whole day empty thankfully and Hans decided that he wanted to go to see Tower House. Even though I had to sit in the back and make the dog less nervous, I agreed to accompany him. Getting there is not easy because of the road works around the port.
All along the dusty pitted roads, articulated trucks and tankers were lined up waiting to load and offload at the port. Several times we had to do a U-turn and an hour after leaving Masaki we eventually came to the turning we guessed was for Tower House.
Here is where the road got really bad – we pitched and rolled and rumbled along the dusty road guessing which way to turn at every junction, hoping that our intuition would leave us there.
Eventually we came to a quarry where Hans stopped and remonstrated with the workers for their lorries making a mess of the road. I waited, slightly embarrassed knowing that it would make no difference except to make him feel better for venting.
When we got Tower House we couldn’t go inside because someone was renting it but we could get to the beach., And what a beach.
We clambered down the jagged rocks on rudimentary steps carved into the coral. The beach was empty except for a couple of men pulling their boats onto the sand. South of Dar there are some magnificent beaches which I have written about before.
On the beach we scattered to go our own ways. Naturally, I went straight towards the little village nestled behind a row of trees. Here there were a handful of ramshackle structures, a herd of cows and a few wooden ngalawa fishing boats. I had got a local man to make me one earlier this year when I planned to leave Tanzania for good. It’s one of my prized possessions now.
There were no children in this village, only fishermen and wives. Someone shouted to me “Welcome to the ghetto”. It wasn’t a ghetto but I suppose he felt I might have though that. An enterprising person had used a baobab tree as one side of the house, used scrap for the other side and plastic and fabric as a door.
After spending a couple of very hot sweaty hours unprotected in the sun we headed back to the car. Hans decided that as we were so close to Kimbiji that we should go there for a beer. The thought of cold beer was tempting and although I would have preferred to go back to Dar, we carried on south.
In the village of Kimbiji Hans thought he’d pull over to get some water and then drove into a ditch. There was cursing from the front and then a crowd gathered. I climbed out of the car jumped down to the ground and pulled the dog out too.
This must have been the most interesting thing that happened in the village for a long time. I sat in the shade and waited for him to sort it out which thankfully didn’t take long with the help of a rope and a passing truck.
The beaches to the south of Dar are spectacular and little visited, especially those over which you have to travel so far on dusty tracks. But it’s always worth the trouble when you get there.